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Saturday

Eric Steel On His Unsettling Documentary The Bridge

What makes someone take their own life and what does the end look like? Eric Steel tried to find out.

Eric
Steel wanted to explore one of western society’s last taboos:
suicide. Now he has been attacked for including footage of people
jumping to their deaths off San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge in
his extraordinary debut documentary, The Bridge.

His detractors claim
that at best the film is voyeuristic and exploitative, at worst that
it is a snuff movie. Steel, who trained two cameras on the iconic
structure throughout the whole of 2004, says he would have felt
“dishonest” if he had not included the footage. “It was
something that I witnessed. Something other people witnessed. That
was being witnessed all the time with great regularity.”

The
frequency is indeed shocking. Not only is the GGB reportedly the most
photographed monument in the world, it is ironically also the most
popular location for committing suicide. Twenty four people took the
fatal plunge in 2004, while the overall total since the bridge opened
in 1937 is over 1300. All the deaths Steel filmed took place in broad
daylight and, for the most part, in plain view of other people.
That they happened in public persuaded him that he was not doing
anything unethical.

“It
really is about bearing witness to a great tragedy,” Steel
says. “There was certainly no enjoyment in seeing this. The feeling
that you have when you see someone in absolute panic and terror,
there is no like, ‘Oh, what a great shot!’ It never crosses your
mind. Never.” He and his crew actually saved lives, he claims.
“Whenever we saw someone climb up on the rail we called the Bridge
District. We saved six people. I don’t know a single filmmaker
anywhere that can say that.”

Steel compares
himself to documentary-makers working in places like Iraq,
where people are dying all the time. “They’ll say, ‘This is
what I do, I’m a filmmaker. I’m a witness to this and I record
this.’ For some reason, because, I guess, it’s suicide, people
have applied the standard differently, it seems, to me and the film.
People are like, ‘Why didn’t you just get up there on the bridge
and stop people jumping?’ It’s not that easy.”

He
believes that part of this reaction stems from the film challenging
audiences to confront a “terrifying taboo”. Suicide scares
us because “everyone has a moment where it crosses your mind. We’re
more comfortable when it happens in a dorm room or in a barn, or in
the middle of the night out on a road, than we are when it happens in
broad daylight. This way you’re forced to look at the people and it
makes people very uncomfortable.”

But
The Bridge is not just about watching people jumping. The meat of the
film is intimate interviews with relatives and friends and eye
witnesses, people who were saved from jumping, and a young man who
survived, having decided on the way down that he wanted to live.
Using these, Steel attempts to build up a picture of the victims’
emotional and mental histories. He also shows the effects
of suicide on the people left behind, and not only their hurt but in
some cases their anger and, very often, their guilt. “I think
with people who lose someone to suicide it has a totally unique
afterlife,” Steel says. “It’s like whatever happens you’re
always playing the tape in reverse looking for those moments. What if
I had done this? What if I had done with that? That never really goes
away.”

Steel’s
own personal anguish laid the foundation for the film. His brother
died of cancer, age 17, and a year later his sister was killed by a
drunk driver. There were times when he would wake up in the morning
in despair, but he never thought of killing himself. “I guess the
question of why I didn’t ever feel that way was somewhere in the
back of my head. You know, what is that thing that makes us want to
live?”

When
9/11 happened, he watched from his window as people jumped from
the World Trade Center rather than “dying in the inferno”. Later,
Tad Friend wrote a story in the New Yorker about the GGB suicides. “I
must have made some connection and thought that these people were
also, in a way, trying to escape a sort of personal emotional
inferno. The idea that someone had to walk from some spot off the
bridge to some spot on the bridge, in plain sight, I guess it just
gave me this idea that I would see something about the nature of how
one goes from being alive to not [being alive].”

Since
making the film, Steel has drawn fire for his methods. He lied to get
a permit to film the bridge, claiming, apparently, that he was making
the first in a series of documentaries about national monuments.
Then, when he interviewed the relatives, he waited to tell them that
he had filmed their loved ones’ deaths. He claims that he needed to
maintain a level of secrecy because as the bridge was approaching its
1000th death, the phenomenon became the subject of radio
conversations and some newspapers kept a running tally, and there was
a "mad spike" of people jumping off the bridge. “What
that meant to me was there were people out there in the world, who
were unstable and unwell, who would be seeking attention in all the
worst possible ways," Steel explains. "Everyone talks
about the ethics of this film but the one ethical question I had to
answer above all else was that I wouldn’t induce anyone to jump in
order to be immortalised on film.”

He
did not tell the families immediately because they might have got the
wrong idea about what he would show in the film and tip off the
Bridge District. “Knowing myself and believing I’m a sensitive
person, and knowing it was never really meant to be a salacious, gory
exploitation film, I just knew I wouldn’t put [the families] in a
position that would make them feel bad. I mean I had to believe that
about myself.”

The
results are uncomfortable and thought-provoking. We watch people
climb over the rail and then drop into the water. Sometimes we just
see a splash in the distance, sometimes we follow them down. There is
nothing as graphic as the descriptions of popped eye sockets and
people drowning in Friend's article. The film is not exploitative,
although it raises several ethical conundrums.

Watching
it you feel like you are staring into the same puzzling black
hole as the relatives. There are no answers, just troubling questions
– and an ocean of sadness. When I tell Steel that I found nothing
reassuring in the film, he says that was not his objective.

“It’s
meant to challenge you to think about the nature of suicide, about
the nature of our relationships to other people. If I wanted to give
you easy answers I could have trotted out psychiatrists saying
‘suicide is a permanent solution to a temporary problem’, all the
lines every single expert will offer you, but that doesn't make
you think.”

One
of the men he filmed jumping had just turned 40 and felt alone and
isolated. Steel could relate as he had turned 40 while he
was making The Bridge. “I was like, 'Uh-oh. I don’t have any
money. My whole life is just spent staring at people killing
themselves off the bridge.’ I could understand that isolation. Most
of us feel depressed or despair, maybe not with paranoid
schizophrenia or bipolar disorder, but most of us know what it feels
like to end a relationship and lose your job and not be able to sleep
all in the same week. Those things happen.”

The
difference is that most of us do not kill ourselves. And therein lays
the chilling unsolved mystery at the heart of this unsettling and
highly recommended film.

"Your piece is one of the most comprehensive, eloquent, and powerful discussions of the film I have read." Joshua Oppenheimer, director of The Act of Killing

"Stephen, this is a fabulous piece; you did a superlative job in communicating the film and its essence." Erik Greenberg Anjou, director of Deli Man

"I have to thank you. It's a very good [Mein Kampf] article, which you have written; it reflects very sharply and especially fairly the various positions." Dr. Christian Hartmann, Institute of Contemporary History Munich